


Hydrophobia

by autiotalo (orphan_account)



Category: Rammstein
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:29:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/autiotalo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Compulsions begin in the strangest places, linked to the strangest times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hydrophobia

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a true event as recorded in Werner Lindemann's memoirs.

The day I shot him was the day that changed my life forever.

My sister cried when we told her the news. "Is it necessary? Really necessary?" she asked over and over, although she knew the answer full well. Her kitten was of little comfort then, staring at us with round unblinking green eyes that were devil-slitted and demonic in their disinterest, but she clung to it anyway.

I waited until early evening, when he was accustomed to going out. It seemed less cruel. Mercy was in short supply that day. It was my sole gesture in its direction.

He watched me leave the room, mildly curious as to his fate but not yet realising that destiny had dealt his final hand.

I went and fetched the shotgun. It was old but well oiled, its oak-wood and steel-strapped stock polished to a gloss matched only by the shine on my father's Sunday shoes. In a drawer opposite was the cardboard box with the bullets, wrapped up in an oily rag. It was supposed to dissuade childish fingers from exploring further, but I had a vivid memory of being seven, maybe eight years old, and discovering the box despite the filthy wad around it.

How fascinating they had been, these dull gleaming things that rolled so coldly on my palms! How interesting was the shape: the blunt end scored once around and notched, the other end tapering to a point – but how painful was the punishment when my mother found me counting out the bullets. She'd dragged me by the collar into my father's study.

I always associate punishment with that room. Earlier on the day I shot him, when we should have been sensible about matters, my father managed to make my task seem like a reproach: it had been my fault that things had got this way.

I refused to do it until after dinner. He glared at me across the dining table and spoke of urgency. In the end I left because I could not stomach neither the food nor my father's company, and so instead I took the gun and the bullets and looked at both for a moment.

It was not the first time I'd handled the gun. I snapped it open and carefully loaded the cartridges into the chambers, smearing oil onto my thumb in the process. Then I closed it back together, liking the reassuring snap it made: a comforting sound, as if it were telling me it wouldn't let me down.

From the hook on the back of the kitchen door I took the old leather leash, and he got up from his basket and came towards me expectantly. He limped only slightly. The bite-marks were still visible through his coat, a torn patch of pink flesh, raised and puffed and weeping occasionally when he worried at it.

From a casual glance, he seemed normal – just a dog that had had the misfortune to be bitten by a fox. It was only when one looked closer, when one had been on intimate terms with the dog since he was a puppy, that the fatal disease could be discerned.

His water bowl lay untouched. For the past four weeks he'd eaten his food and drunk his water, with only the slightest note of discord roughening his voice. Then, as the days ticked by, he barked more, and louder, and at any passing fancy. He seemed confused at times, and would snarl if his legs suddenly gave way beneath him. The avoidance of water was the final indication of what I'd feared since the day he'd come whining back from the woods.

Hydrophobia.

And before he could be driven insane with the agony of it all, before he could turn upon us, he would have to die by the hand that fed him.

"Come," I said to him, slipping the leash around his neck and tugging on his ears, feeling the silk of his coat smooth through my fingers. He wagged his tail, already nosing towards the door, and so I lifted the latch to let us both out into the evening air.

Our walk was quiet. I nursed the shotgun over the crook of my arm and kept hold of his leash with the other. He put his head down and sniffed at the grass, occasionally pulling in one direction when he caught a scent. At first I went along with him, standing over rabbit warrens and following sightless trails across the fields; but as the night drew in I realised I was delaying the moment.

I led him on towards the woods. In daylight it was a place of retreat; at night it could be a place of discovered delight: but not this evening. The darkness only touched at the perimeter, so I pushed on through the undergrowth, wanting to reach its heart. Denser, deeper; the feeling that I was lost came to me like the echo of some childish nightmare, and the only things real to me were the gun and the animal drawing me on ahead.

Finally we reached a clearing. Bracken lay rotting underfoot, the ground soft with decay, and the tightly curled new ferns testimony to the fertility of the soil. I reasoned it would be as good a place as any. Here I bent and tied one end of the leash to a sapling, and then stood back to cock the trigger.

He sat down. I hadn't expected that. Usually I had to tell him to sit, but that day he just did it, his tail beating the mulch hesitantly, as if he were looking for approval. His head turned, muzzle sharp in the fading light, and I saw his eyes.

I told myself it was only my imagination that assigned human emotions to animals. I told myself it was the virus that made his eyes so over-bright. The disease, and nothing more.

I'm a good liar.

I put the gun to my shoulder, aimed, and fired. At that range I wasn't likely to miss. It was over in a matter of seconds. The discharge of the rounds slammed the gun back against my shoulder and blew a hole through his head. There was a dreadful moment when he leapt up, the way he always did in greeting whenever I came home; but later I realised it was from the force of the bullets ripping him apart.

He tumbled back, tail still wagging obscenely in his last romp in the bracken, the leash dictating just how far he fell. By the time the echo of the shots had faded and the woods leaned forward to hear the aftermath, he was long dead.

I set down the shotgun and knelt in the dampness of the earth, tracing my fingers towards him. I touched blood before I stroked his coat, and for the first time that evening I could smell. Harsh, metalled, curdled with trust and poison, it clung to me then and for the rest of the night. Unthinkingly, I loosened the leash and pulled it from the tree, the action ludicrous yet somehow necessary.

The sky was clouding over. I had not thought to bring a shovel. I scraped a rough oval through the mulch, feeling a hundred insects squirm and crawl and bite; then I dug a shallow grave using only my hands. After half an hour, it was enough. I tipped his body into the hollow and covered it over, scattering scarlet-rusted bracken in place of ashes and dust.

Then I retrieved the gun and wrapped the leash tightly about my left forearm and around my knuckles to cross my palm time and again. This done, I retreated a safe distance away and stood at the edge of the woods, watching night sink over the country. I leaned against an elm and smoked a cigarette to keep off the last of the midges, listening to the sounds of darkness surround me.

The trees wept as the mist came down. A thrush-nightingale called once, its deep-throated trill descending into a series of barely audible clicks. A fox answered it, the unearthly scream startling me into dropping my cigarette.

My soft curse as I scrambled to stamp out the glowing light alerted a sleepy blackbird, and its furious chatter made me leave, feeling like an outsider. I walked back across the fields, the gunstock bumping against my thigh with every other step. Standing with one foot on the lower rung of the gate to our yard, his arms crossed as he waited for me, my father made no comment as to the time I'd taken. As I came closer, he looked at me and said, "You did it, then."

There was no point in responding. I went inside and began to unwrap the leash from my hand, ready to hang it on the hook behind the door; but then I remembered.

Instead I replaced the shotgun before I climbed the stairs to my room. Slamming the door seemed too strong a complaint, so I let it fall softly shut and went to the record player, selecting one of the crackly old 45s. I lay down across my bed to stare at the ceiling. The arm swung across, clicked, and lowered itself to the start of the record. I heard the hiss and bounce as the needle settled, then the song began. A woman's voice, singing a lament for her lover taken for the war, fearful that she'll never see him again: mournful and depressing as folksongs often are.

I rolled over and nudged the record player so that the needle scraped across the final verse and it fell into silence, broken only by the click-click-click of the needle against the paper label in the centre of the disc.

I remained motionless for a while; my hands on the floor, examining the way the leash crawled around my arm. I flexed the muscles, forced my hand into a fist, and watched the blackened leather grip tight, tighter. My skin went first pink, then white on my forearm. Across my knuckles it just cut blind white, the rough under-part of the leather scraping the flesh in a way not unpleasant even as it eased its way sharply across my palm.

I relaxed and felt the pump of blood return to the tourniqued sections of my arm. The white turned red, then slowly filled back with normal colour, leaving behind a faint tingling sensation. It was the nearest thing to an emotion I'd felt in the past few hours.

Later, I found myself in the village, wandering through the streets like the ghostly owls that swung high above, enervated and on a pointless quest. Lamps lit only the point directly beneath them, leaving the unwary to stumble through ruts and puddles, but all those who came here at night would know the broken surfaces as well as they knew their own reflections.

The rest of the village fell away from the main street, darkness giving distance to the squared bell tower of the church. Even the night could not obliterate its shape completely, and eventually I turned away from its uneasy outline for the smoked-sweat blur of the bar.

Beer, still cold enough to retain a few drops of condensation on the outside of the glass. The sound of soulful American 60s songs warped into oblivion by repeated playings. Laughter and gossip, flirtations and threats, the scrape of chairs against the floor and the clink and clash of glasses. Another normal night. Nothing changes.

I sat in my usual corner of the bar and watched it all unfold with only the faintest sense of being a part of it. The feeling stays with me now, even years after that night: disassociation, disinterest, call it whatever you wish. The goldfish outside of the bowl, breathing the air for fear of the water… Hydrophobia.

I sat there and nursed my drink. My hands were curled on the bar, and in the harsh light I could see the filth beneath my nails: the ooze of mulch, the stain of oil on my thumb, the streaks of earth that ran up my fingers and cracked across each knuckle. Then there was the blood, dried to a darkness that made it splinter and peel away to scatter on the bar whenever I moved my hands.

The landlord hadn't said anything. Probably he never noticed.

Wrapped around my left hand was the leash. When I raised the glass for a drink, the sleeve of my coat would ride up and anyone who was interested could see the leather trailing serpentine up my forearm. It felt good there; almost like a glove. And like a glove, it could be seen as a challenge, a statement of intent.

I didn't see her coming, but then through the stench there was a new scent. of cheap perfume and sour sweat. She wore purple earrings that touched her jawbone when she moved her head, and her mascara had started to run. It made her eyes huge black blotches in her white face, like staring into the twin barrels of a shotgun. She smiled at me, and by that smile I could tell her age – ten, maybe twelve years older than me.

"Get you a drink?"

I looked at my glass. It was still three-quarters full. I looked back at her.

Her smile actually increased.

I raised my eyebrows.

"Do you talk?" she asked.

I turned back to my drink, but before I could lift the glass, she had her hand on my arm and was fingering the leash. Her nails scraped the flesh pushed outwards by the tight ravelling of the leather, and I shivered. She continued to stroke my forearm, beginning to tug at the hairs until I grimaced. Her hand closed around my wrist, then she slipped her index finger under the tangle of leather crossing my palm. Suddenly, sharply, she crooked her finger and pulled tight the leash. It bit down, harder than I'd tried at home, and the crushed shock of it was reality pure and simple.

When she left the bar, I followed her. In a doorway she let me fuck her, although the desire I felt was not for her but for the leash strangling my arm to blank pins and needles into my fingers. All the way through it, she kept hold of the leash, dragging it tighter and tighter until orgasm, when the rush of blood was as keen as that of ejaculation.

I understand now that she had as little clue as to what she was doing to me as I had any clue as to what I was doing to myself. Time brings such great clarity, even if it does not give satisfactory explanations.

On the way home, I stopped beside the path across the fields to the wood and was violently sick: sick until it made me cry with the fear that there was no end to the bile my stomach heaved up.

I still fear it today; and yet I am held in the rhythm of compulsion that makes me seek out the leash, no matter how old and worn it might be. It still hangs on a hook behind the kitchen door. The charge it brings is as powerful as a gunshot. It's a wound that never bleeds, but always requires attention. It's escape from the depths of emotion, and its kiss is fatal.

Hydrophobia.


End file.
